Pastry Making

Let fall the flour
so that it flows, flops
from bag or jar
onto the shiny scale
in a snowy slump.
Watch the needle nudge
towards the required mark,
then lift high your sieve
into which you pour
and sift the weighed out matter
through the perforations
so that an avalanche,
freshly aerated,
mesh mediated,
settles lightly as white dust
in the bowl beneath.
Now, to the sifted flour
add cold, cut, cubed,
lard or marge or butter,
and merge, blend, mix
the airy with the solid,
the fatty with the fine,
the white or yellow with the white.
Next, with the side of a knife blade,
slowly, so slowly, stir in water until
flour and fat coagulate,
become a malleable,
mouldable, holdable clot
rollable and ready -
for reshaping,
for baking.

Susan Clark

If you have any thoughts on this poem, Susan Clark  would be pleased to hear them.